Jess Lund has joined the team as an MSc student at the University of Cape Town. She is currently assisting with several projects in Zambia this wet season but will return to Cape Town soon to begin. Her project will focus on the coevolutionary consequences of host egg signatures in the fork-tailed drongo, and its specialist parasite, the African cuckoo. Jess’s previous research during her BSc(Hons) research at the University of Cape Town was on winter thermoregulation in African Pygmy Falcons in the Kalahari.
New paper on imperfect egg mimicry
Our paper “Combined measures of mimetic fidelity explain imperfect mimicry in a brood parasite-host system” has just been published in the journal Biology Letters. This study was led by Tanmay Dixit, and carried out together with Gary Choi, Salem al-Mosleh, Jess Lund, Jolyon Troscianko, Collins Moya, L Mahadevan, and Claire Spottiswoode, as part of a collaboration between our group and Prof. Mahadevan and his lab at Harvard University. Together we combined mathematical tools and field experiments in Zambia to quantify a key difference – “squiggle” markings – between the eggs of hosts (tawny-flanked prinias) and parasites (cuckoo finches). We showed that suboptimal behaviour on the part of prinias allows cuckoo finches to get by with an imperfect copy of prinia eggs.